John Thompson was an award-winning historian, lobbyist, and guerrilla-gardener who became an award-winning inner city teacher after crack and gangs hit his neighborhood. He blogs at thisweekineducation.com and is writing a book on 18 years of idealistic politics in the classroom and realistic politics outside. A former oilfield roughneck and hitch-hiker, a current backpacker and Obamamaniac, he is a "people person" who seeks compromises, while defending the principles of the liberal arts and constitutional democracy. He is a nonstop memo writer and enthusiastic basketball player, believing that education is an affair of the heart not a narrow part of the intellect.

Anya Kamenetz's The Test will stand on its own as an excellent work of scholarship. It will not be research findings, philanthropists, the USDOE, or even teachers who will determine the role of testing in the next generation of public schools. It will be the students and the parents of...

In one sense, I can understand why some Americans have flirted with the "Faustian bargain" that is high-stakes testing. As Yong Zhao explains in Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon, the authoritarianism of a single, test-driven ladder to economic success has an enduring power. But I don't understand reformers...

Most innovations fail. And like NPR Planet Money'sAdam Davidson explains, "life span of innovations has never shorter, meaning that failure happens more quickly." So it is not too soon to start to contemplate of the obituaries of the contemporary school reform movement.

Why would Tulsa even think of hiring embattled Chief for Change Deborah Gist as superintendent? Oklahoma voters recently rejected Chief for Change Janet Barresi and her devotion to test, sort and punish. Students, parents, teachers, and administrators have risen up in a grassroots rebellion against the bubble-in mania...

Democrats who support test-driven reform are showcasing a kinder, gentler soundbite to defend the indefensible. No longer do they take the "Sister Soldja" position, showing how macho they are by beating up on two of their most loyal constituencies - teachers and unions. Now, the rationale for attaching...

Perhaps the best thing about Justice While Black, by Robbin Shipp and Nick Chiles, is the way that it puts individual faces on the persons, disproportionately African-American males, who are systematically abused by the criminal justice system. Shipp draws on her experience as a criminal defense attorney in...

It was a canny move by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel to intersperse warnings against "confirmation bias" throughout their excellent Make It Stick. Although we educators in the progressive tradition(s) will stress their evidence that explains the failure of test-driven reform, true believers in output-driven reform...

We often hear that public education suffers from a "culture of compliance." I often add that the refusal of education leaders to speak obvious truths is due to the "blame game," which has created a culture of powerlessness. What I mean, but don't dare articulate, is that education across much...

In 2000, Pat McGuigan, the conservative editor of the Daily Oklahoman, visited our high school government class. This was an exciting time when a bipartisan school improvement coalition, MAPS for KIDS, was sponsoring an ongoing conversation between the full range of community stakeholders and our diverse student bodies.

Some non-educators are taken aback by the series of reports on the way that testing eats up incredible amounts of class time -- up to 80 days a year. Skeptics might believe that teachers across the nation are suffering from a mass hallucination, or maybe they don't understand the complex...

Teachers have learned a lesson the hard way, and it should not be lost on the Democratic Party, the Obama administration, or Hillary Clinton. We now understand how hard it is to do our job, and serve our students with one hand, as we fend off test-driven reform with the...

Shannon Hernandez was a superb teacher. She remains a "big dreamer, an out-of-the-box thinker, a change agent" and, above all, she remains true to the now heretical principle that our job is to "teach students, not subjects." But, like so many other teachers, Hernandez found that test-driven reform was "sucking...

I should start my review of Anthony Cody's The Educator and the Oligarch by acknowledging that I blog for Anthony and we've had many, often extended, editorial discussions. There has been a clear pattern with our discussions/debates. My first thoughts on corporate reform have been consistently more moderate than Anthony's....

Liberal school reformers, such as Russyln Ali, have long argued that if even one "high-flying" high-poverty school can overcome poverty, then teachers in schools that aren't selective, and who serve neighborhoods with intense concentrations of generational poverty, could do the same. Ali claimed, "The biggest challenge these educators...

As promised, Dana Goldstein's thoroughly researched The Teacher Wars is more analytic than opinionated. Goldstein's objective narrative of assaults on the teaching profession lets the historical record take the place of commentary.